Newcomers and Immigrants

One of the most dizzying insights that genealogy teaches is that, ultimately, everyone came from elsewhere; though your ancestors may have lived in the same locality for generations, at some point in the past, however distant, they arrived there from somewhere else. And their ancestors arrived at that somewhere else from somewhere else again. And so on ad infinitum. The need to identify a point of origin is the motivating root of most family history but, unless you count the Garden of Eden, there is no such point.